Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday June 27, 2013 @04:52PM
from the sir-you-need-to-get-back-in-line dept.

symbolset writes "Ars is reporting that Microsoft XBox One Kinect will not work on Windows PCs. It uses a proprietary connector and an adaptor will not be available. If you want Kinect for your PC you will need to buy a 'Kinect for Windows' product. Although the Kinect 1.0 for XBox 360 also had a proprietary connector it came with a USB adaptor for compatibility with older versions of the 360 that lacked the new proprietary port and PC compatibility was quickly hacked up by third parties."

"Original article says they're going to release 2 different Kinects; one for Windows and one for XBox One... but hey, let's form opinions based on headlines and cherry picking quotes!"

I think you need to look up what "compartmentalize" means.

He didn't say anything about them not releasing a Kinect for Windows. He just pointed out that you now need two separate but similar devices to solve a problem that used to be covered with a single device.

For those of us who worked with Kinect, we know very well all of it's limitations. It's a promising technology but it's still very green and far from what it is advertised as. It pretty much only works if you are looking to the camera and waving your hands and legs. Any attempt to turn sideways or even put your hands together completely confuses the heck out of it (check their technology demo videos, such scenarios are all purposely avoided). There's even open source implementations of the pose recognition that work better (though they need calibration).
By making it XB1 only hackers will not be able to see how much it really improved (likely not much judging by their videos). So far from what I can tell, only the APIs improved so it's easier to get data from it (full matrices, motion vectors and strain, which you could easily compute yourself anyway), and some stuff was added to detect heart and blood rate (likely based on this MIT stuff [mit.edu]. That's pretty much it.

Xbox is sold at a loss and subsidized by the expectation of future game sales.

Xbox hasn't been sold for years. Xbox 360 is profitable. Xbox One is powered by an APU and RAM isn't expensive any more, they are probably actually making a profit selling $400 consoles.

What Microsoft obviously doesn't want people doing is buying an Xbox, using only the Kincect, and not buying any media. Thus Kinect for Xbox only works with Xbox

No, Kinect for Xbox 360 works with PC, with community software. Kinect for Xbox One has been said by Microsoft to not work with PC, but that's also what they said about Kinect for Xbox 360.

I know it's tedious to get these names right, because Microsoft came up with shitty names, but please try to do so anyway. If you expect people to parse your comments, then it's reasonable for others to expect them to be correct.

Also, Kinect for Windows runs the IR at 640x480. The Xbox Kinect runs at 320x240 (even though its sensor is 640x480) because the Xbox360 does not have sufficient USB bandwidth to handle 4x audio streams, and 2x VGA 60fps streams.(in theory, the Xbox can do just under 40MB/sec over USB2, but in practice, it's only getting half that).

Kinect 2 for Windows requires USB3 because its cameras are high def, including the time-of-flight one.

The XBOX 360 pads used a cryptographic handshake to make sure no unauthorized 3rd party could make their own. It would be easy to make it work the other way too, i.e. prevent the Kinect working on a PC without doing the handshake which relies on a secret key hidden in the XBone.

It took maybe 5 years for a Chinese company to make their own 360 controllers. Presumably the DRM on the new hardware will be better protected.